Gràinne awoke in the darkness.  By the faint light of her silima tattoos, she discerned she was atop a tall stalagmite rising from an abyss.  Irimë awoke in a nearly vertical tunnel and cast a magical light from her protean ring.  Gràinne climbed down as Irimë climbed up, and the two found each other on a canyon wall in a great underground cavern.  They followed a tunnel along a ledge that led them to a precipice where a band of hobgoblins had been starving and cannibalizing themselves rather than proceed down a nearby hole.  When Irimë spoke to them in the Black Speech, inquiring about the hole, they cowered in fear, revealing that they dare not go down it for the unnamed horror that await them inside.  Heedless of their warning, Gràinne and Irimë entered the hole, and the hobgoblins attacked them from behind.  Irimë slew them with her daggers, and they proceeded down the hole.

 

Some distance down the tunnel, an enormous tentacle groped at them from the darkness, and Gràinne and Irimë slashed and hacked at it with their blades.  Finally killing the nameless horror, they pushed it down the tunnel until it dropped down a pit.  Leaping over the pit, they narrowly avoided a net trap, and found themselves in the hobgoblin lair.  They slew the hobgoblins that came out to meet them, and Gràinne took the whip of the chieftain.  Following the tunnel further, they found themselves in a network of caverns, and followed some passing orcs to the territory of Boldog, the Orc king.  They hid the shadows and listened to the orc soldiers report upon the doings of the hobgoblins to their king.  As the soldiers turned to depart, they spotted Gràinne and Irimë, who drew their weapons to defend themselves.  They slew the orcs and the king’s concubines, who also attacked with knives, and subdued the Boldog.  As orcs gathered by the scores outside the throne room, they had Boldog lead them out, in hopes of leaving this subterranean labyrinth.  Boldog informed them that there was no way out, for they had found themselves in Angband!

 

When they inquired about the goblins on the surface, Boldog informed them that there were Men in the caverns, a sorcerer and his acolytes, who enthralled many of the goblins to do his bidding on the outside, and that he may know a way out.  Boldog warned that even he, the orc king, who was in fact a Maia in an Orkish hröa, dared not face the sorcerer.  Unfazed by Boldog’s caution, they urged him lead on to the sorcerer’s abode.  As they traveled, they asked for water, and Boldog led them to a cavern centered with a large pool.  Gràinne notice that the water had an oily film on it, and when she leaned in to smell it, a watcher in the wather reached out with several tentacles, groping for its prey!